Ecommerce News Around the Web for January 29, 2010

Apple iPad Could Have Profound Effect on Ecommerce – EDL Consulting

To say there is a lot of talk about the [newly released] Apple iPad is an understatement, but could it have an effect on ecommerce? In one respect at least. It would allow major media companies to put their content behind a pay wall making access available only to those willing to fork over the dough.

The next phenomenon in Internet tech may be location-based services like Foursquare and Loopt, but whether they are good for business may still be open to question. MediaPost blogger David Berkowitz discusses seven such services in this post.

If you have a brick-and-mortar presence, location-based services like Foursquare may prove to be beneficial. Put your marketing hat on and take a look at seven ways Foursquare could boost your business.

Want to know what your friends are buying and how much they spent? Blippy is where you can find that out. Blippy is a new social networking site that allows you to link a debit/credit card to your account and every time you use the card Blippy will display how much you spent and where it was spent. Believe it or not, people are signing up for the service in droves.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects against unlawful search and seizure. There is some controversy over whether data stored in offsite servers (the cloud) is subject to the constraints of the amendment.

A MarketingProfs’ recent report, The State of Social Media Marketing, reveals that Facebook has the edge over Twitter in being advantageous as a marketing tool. The report revealed a lot more information as well.

2009 Was a Very Good Year for Facebook – comScore

Facebook continues to see considerable growth year after year. 2009 proved to be no exception, and not just in the number of new members, either. Practically every metric showed gains. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by at least double. The Facebook phenomenon continues.

comScore reports that three out of five Australians online visited an online retail site in December 2009. Traffic to the category reached its highest volume of the year with more than 8 million visitors during the month, a three percent increase from the year before.

Switch to an email service provider (ESP) like MailChimp, Constant Contact or Vertical Response and your deliverability problems are solved, right? Maybe not. It’s not necessarily a path to immediate success. However, read one ecommerce merchant’s story and how switching to an ESP did, in fact, help.

Online advertisers make frequent use of AdWords reporting in Google Analytics to measure the impact of paid visitors to their site and business. Sometimes there is a discrepancy in the reported number of visits and clicks. This post from the Google Analytics blog talks about why.

As marketers prepare for the post-recession economy, they are almost universal in their plans to increase online spending, especially in social and mobile media. Marketers, there is no rest of the weary. Times have changed.